Abstract

It must have been shortly after I entered college in my middle ̓teens that I first heard of the grammatical doctrine that psychological opposites take the same construction. As a mnemonic, alone, the doctrine is immensely worth while and practically helps with categories like —which rouses a literary interest by recalling Thackeray's use of different to as a counter term to equal to, similar to, like to. And, to get back to grammar, for English folk it clarifies prope ab to counter it with procul ab. By the doctrine of opposites we clarify even so elusive a matter as the ‘subjunctive of repudiation’ which I once sought to explain by partial obliquity , not mistaking therein, I am fain to believe, the valuable stylistic note of echo. In this subjunctive I now see a clear opposite to the concessive. It is a survival, on the cold page, of a speech form that owed its meaning to the speaker's mood (xs22EF ψυχικxs22EF διxs22EFθεσις, the pitch of his voice, all the things that manifest and betray emotion, and so far forth is ‘polemic’ It is often introduced by ut, utne, egone ut, where ut is exclamatory and interrogative at once, and the tone converts the concessive to an anticoncessive, indicating repudiation, disavowal